It’s been a long time since Tim Finn was dressing in the glamorous, brightly coloured suits of Split Enz, but the singer and songwriter this morning stepped into a genuinely surprising role, performing a song from his hit musical Ladies in Black. To launch the 2017 tour of the show, Finn sang a number he wrote for Rudi, the 40-year-old Hungarian woman who runs the model gowns section of a Sydney department store.

Ladies in Black is based on Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel, The Women in Black, and tells of a 16-year-old girl who, in the late 1950s, gets a holiday job at one of Sydney’s most prestigious stores. The production premiered last year at the Queensland Theatre Company before moving earlier this year to Melbourne. Its 2017 tour kicks off at the Sydney Lyric Theatre, as part of Sydney Festival.

We caught Finn’s performance and asked him about moving from pop writing to musical theatre.

[box]Ladies in Black tours to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra in 2017.